Pursuing Pigeon In Paint

Luckily, I caught her mid-crime and purple-pawed before she could decorate the rest of my furniture.

This messy episode got me thinking about the textural experience of paint from the perspective of a very small animal. I daydreamed what would it be like to traverse the paint as a tiny fly?

In this painting Surrealism meets Pop Art. The terrain is made of enlarged macro globs of oil paint. A young tortoiseshell—my cat, Foxy—hides behind a colorful impasto ridge, ears back, about to spring forward like the hunter she knows she truly is. Her expression is one of reckless desire and abandon. She is a little fiend yearning to go on a spree—the alizarin red behind her is as demonically mischievous as she is. Her eyes are bugged out like a gambler’s on speed: she is ready to sacrifice everything to pulverize the bird.

The pigeon doesn’t see the cat; its pupils are focused on a point beyond our field of vision. It’s perched on a globby knob of pink and ice turquoise paint, the bird’s tail casting a purple shadow.
This painting ended up being a metaphor for being stuck with an artist. Foxy lives an indoor life, trapped in my apartment, and she often jumps up on my painting desk to chirp aggressive death-filled meow-peeps at the pigeons across the street, in an inaccessible dimension. She is separated from them by an untraversable three floors (and glass).

After I did this painting I got fixated on big cats in pursuit, which led me to paint Tiger Fire. My Foxy scene is the little sister of that tiger painting. She is the tiny, domesticated counterpart to the tiger’s massive freedom.